GOP Candidate Warns Democrats Will Take Away Your Freedom To Find The Lord And Get Your Salvation

July 15, 2010 — Ron Chusid

We’ve become accustomed to Republicans using scare tactics such as claims that Democrats will take away your guns. Sometimes, such as in a GOP mailer in West Virginia in 2004 attacking John Kerry, they have claimed Democrats will take away your bibles. Now we have a new twist. Ed Martin, a Republican Congressional candidate in Missouri warns that Obama and his Democratic opponent Russ Carnahan will take away your freedom to find god and get your salvation. Here is a portion of an interview:

MARTIN: One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We’re great because we created a place and space where people can be free. And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful. They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord. And — or some of them don’t. We sure want them all to, but some of them don’t.

And part of that freedom — when you take a government and you impose, and take away all your choices. One of the choices you take away is to find the Lord. And find your savior.

And that’s one of the things that’s most destructive about the growth of government. It’s this taking away that freedom. The freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.

And I think that’s one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of that the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us.

In the past Martin has accused Carnahan’s sister, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, of being “the devil.”

It is shameful that Ed Martin would use faith to divide rather than unite. This is a baseless attack on my faith and my family.

My own Christian faith has guided me throughout my life. My wife and I have raised our family with the strong values faith has taught me including service to the community, standing up for civil rights and working to protect religious freedom for all faiths.

Ed Martin’s campaign of personal destruction and fear mongering reveals much more about his true character than anything else. This attack demonstrates his willingness to say or do anything to score political points. Ed Martin has crossed the line and this new low is exactly the kind of campaigning that turns voters off from the importance of public service.

You have frequently mentioned authoritarians in your posts, and this quote is certainly an appeal to authoritarian sensibilities of protecting traditional values from an identified threat. There is a very disturbing pattern that has emerged over the last 30 years in American politics with respect to authoritarians.
For the purpose of establishing my point, a short primer on what constitutes authoritarianism is appropriate. Authoritarians are people who would score very high on questions that test aggression towards perceived threats, submission to authority (almost blind submission, but only to authority who they believe share their values), and conventionalism or “traditional values”, (i.e.; religious, often Biblical, sexual, marital, nationalistic).
These types of people have always been with us, but from my research, it appears that in the past, they were fractionalized and marginalized because their voting support was split between the two major political parties in America. Depending on primary perceived threat of authoritarians, they could support Republicans or Democrats. This dynamic has changed. beginning around the time of the Southern Strategy to woo white Southern Democrats to the Republican Party, and followed with a series of issue positions in lockstep with authoritarian attitudes, including gay marriage, an aversion to diversity, religious tests, militarism, patriotism (nationalism), welfare, and others. At this moment, almost 90% of Americans with authoritarian attitudes are solidly Republican voters. It is estimated that these individuals make up approximately 25% of the population, but because of their very high perception of threat, I would argue that they make an even higher percentage of the voting population, perhaps 35% to 40%.
If that is not reason enough for great concern, here is where this change in dynamic gets really scary. The biggest difference between mid-scoring authoritarians and high scoring authoritarians is threat perception. Mid-scoring authoritarians, unlike high scoring authoritarians, do not automatically perceive a threat regardless of whether a threat is present or not, but when they do perceive a threat, whether it is real or manufactured, become likely to make identical decisions as high scoring authoritarians.
The result of this change in dynamic is that for the first time in America history, we are in a position to have our government chosen by the most dangerous, violent, and reactionary elements of our society. And more concerning is that since authoritarian decision making is beyond reason, this group cannot be persuaded, except with a more authoritarian position, which Democrats cannot possibly achieve, and Republicans, who could abandon their authoritarian positions, would be loathe to do so because it would mean abandoning their base of electoral support.
Finally, most concerning, all of these authoritarians issues that have effective polarized authoritarians in the Republican camp have been converged, by accident or design, into a single threat, namely liberalism, or more precisely, the Democratic Party in America. Such is the political environment in America that as much as a third of American voters, and the same third that believes is violent aggression, believe that the greatest threat to their way of life is the Democratic Party itself, is in the position to be determining policy in America.
With Sarah Palin as a good example, whom is considered by this group as extremely popular, but is roundly viewed outside of this group as completely unelectable, our best hope is to see that the wildly radical representatives this group would put forth continue to be seen outside of the authoritarian decision makers almost universally as wholly unacceptable. But if this group ever gains real power, we are in for a very, very dark time.

The Southern Strategy promoted the authoritarian mind set on the right. The response to 9/11 has made things tremendously worse, giving them a new enemy to use to justify their views following the end of the cold war.

I fear that the new enemy being identified (and framed in the Tea Party meme) is not al Qaida as much it is Democrats. What happens when these order takers begin to accept conservative leaders directives to commit violence against Democrats/liberals? Wait, some already have.

1. Rush Limbaugh: “I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

2. Senator Phil Gramm: “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”

4. John Derbyshire intimated in the National Review that because Chelsea Clinton had “the taint,” she should “be killed.”

5. Ann Coulter: “We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too.”

6. Ann Coulter: “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”

7. Bill O’Reilly: “ll those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains.”

8. Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck said he was “thinking about killing Michael Moore” and pondered whether “I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,” before concluding: “No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong?”

9. Fresno City Council Member Jerry Duncan in 2003 wrote in an email that police should “Cap” members of the Human Relations Commission and wrote, “If I had one dirty bomb and I could eliminate all the liberals in Fresno at once.” When his comments became public, Duncan said “The response I have gotten from the public on this has been 100% supportive.”

The Democrats are the enemy at current Tea Party rallies, but overall I think that 9/11 was a major factor in turning the conservative movement into an authoritarian movement during the Bush years. Once the Democrats took office they became the bigger target, especially with the tea bagger portion.

I would agree that mid-scoring authoritarians were amped up to authoritarian decision making by 9/11, people such as Ron Silver and Dennis Miller. But the core group of high scoring authoritarians ALWAYS perceive a threat, regardless of whether a threat is evident. As I said earlier, the difference, I believe, is that today authoritarians have coalesced under the single party banner that now caters to their fearfulness. And as a result of this polarization of authoritarians, the new primary enemy are Democrats.

It would be an interesting experiment on the Tea Party authoritarians to bring a sign saying “Support the Commander in Chief”, and hold it high next to the most violent outrageous sign in the crowd, and see who gets the most negative attention.